As the volume of world knowledge became too vast any one person to know or catalog, a passion to organize, cross-reference, and share information arose in the hearts of some visionary technologists. Discover the ideas, inventions, broken dreams, and altruistic visions that led to today’s hypertext world.

In 1974 most computers were corporate, not personal. Computer Lib urged people to claim computer power for themselves. Dream Machines introduced ideas for hypermedia in video and education, as well as Nelson's vision for a global hypertext publishing system called "Xanadu".

As founding head of Brown University's Computer Science department, graphics pioneer van Dam and his students kept hypertext research alive for the twenty years before it became widely known in the 1980s.

NLS was Doug Engelbart's system for word processing, hypertext, group collaboration and more. Terminals featured a monitor that could display graphics in addition to text, a mouse and a five-button key set.

The Secret History of Hypertext

“Click here.” Today’s hyperlink is a brilliant breakthrough from the 1960s. Hopping between linked pages is what lets us “surf” the Web instead of plodding through it. Yet hypertext virtually disappeared for 20 years, and was so obscure that the father of the Web may have unknowingly re-invented it in 1980.

Hypertext’s inventors -- and some true believers -- kept using it, but mostly in academic applications, or for specialized clients like the military. Most people weren’t aware of hypertext until commercial systems like Apple’s HyperCard in the late 1980s. And, later, the Web.

Hypercard was the first hypertext program to hit the mass market-- 25 years after its invention. Not networked, and with only simple linking, it offered a well-designed scripting language that made hypertext authoring accessible to amateurs.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, affordable data compact disk (CD) drives enabled multimedia encyclopedias, games, novels and reference information on CD, often with hypertext links for navigation. Many publishers later ported their content to the Web.

Microcosm, like competitor OWL Guide, was a full-featured but standalone hypertext system which had some commercial success. Microcosm was developed by University of Southampton, UK, researcher Wendy Hall, a leader in the hypertext and later Web communities.